Quote Originally Posted by Konachibi View Post
Actually to discover what people do and don't like, Yoshi added forums that community reps looked through to see what people are praising about the game and what people are raging about in the game. Forums are an excellent way to see what kind of player-base your game has and what they like about the game, even if it does get a lot of flamers and trolls.

This in turn helps them decide on what kind of content to add to the game sooner rather than later, to make everyone happy.
from a scientific standpoint if he did this the game will probably fail.

There is a way to go about determining peoples opinions on things to get unbiased results.

A forum results in VERY biased results. You get mainly extreme opinions with moderate people pushed to the side. Those extreme opinions are usually far from what people really want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_%28statistics%29

If they are seriously basing all their decisions off their forums then they probably have less than 10% chance at success. Because any half-competent corporation knows how to handle statistics.

A good example of bias is the following (a result of sampling bias, similar to what this forum has):
"In the early days of opinion polling, the American Literary Digest magazine collected over two million postal surveys and predicted that the Republican candidate in the U.S. presidential election, Alf Landon, would beat the incumbent president, Franklin Roosevelt by a large margin. The result was the exact opposite. " (read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samplin...rical_examples)

If SE seriously based their actions on these boards, its very likely they will end up doing exactly the opposite of what they intended due to bias.